Equinix Grows Data Center Capabilities with Packet Acquisition

Bare metal cloud provider Packet, gets picked up.

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While much of the early era of the cloud was about shared virtual infrastructure, in recent years there has been a movement toward enabling bare metal support in the cloud as well.

Equinix is now getting into the bare metal game in a bid to expand its data center cloud offerings. On Jan. 14 Equinix announced the acquisition of privately held bare metal automation cloud platform vendor Packet. Financial terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed. Packet had raised approximately $37 million in funding since the company was founded in 2014

Packet's product portfolio includes a bare metal public cloud, edge cloud as well as an on-premises managed cloud offering. According to Zachary Smith, co-founder and CEO of Packet, the core Packet platform will continue operating in the same way, even after the acquisition closes, at some point before the end of the first quarter of 2020.

In a blog post, Smith outlined the core goal behind Packet overall, which is to build a better internet so that anyone could make global, fundamental infrastructure their competitive advantage.

"Instead of moving up the stack, we would help software innovators build on top of us with automation and consistency," Smith wrote. "Instead of abstracting users from the raw infrastructure, we would give them direct access and help connect them with new technologies. Instead of defining where the hardware could go, what it looked like and who owned it, we would instead invite the opinion of our innovative customers."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.